Paper short abstract:

Material memories invite designers and curators to consider artefacts as the participants involved in a circular relation between collective cultural considerations and individual practices of the habitant, relation in witch the ethnographer is supposed to embody a form of expert valuation.

Paper long abstract:

This proposal aims to explore how the ethnographer can be involved in domestic keepsake exhibition to redefine a collective memory and a cultural identity.

Domestic space is the place were personal memory is preserved. These material memories suppose practices of appropriation and signature of the intimate space that seems to be very personal and difficult to share with unknown people. Nevertheless, such an appropriation can appear as a common social practice that museums and designers pay attention to. This paper will explore two different experiences in which the ethnographer became a mediator between material culture and professionals of it. In both cases, its knowledge is request for designer's or museal projects. In the first case, keepsake can be considered as the paroxystical poorly design object. In the second case, it can appear as characteristic of particular lifestyle. But considering the stories produced about it invites the professional to think its place differently in its practice.

This paper will consider domestic artefacts not simply as a lifestyle exhibition resulting of the interaction between production and consummation but as the participants involved in a circular relation between collective cultural considerations and individual practices of the habitant, relation in witch the ethnographer is supposed to embody a form of expert valuation.